Backwards

I don't ask very much of my readers...especially when it comes to current events. There are so many fights to be fought, and nobody has the energy or the resources to fight them (by design). That's actually the first point I want to make, and it's a doozy.

I shared something on Facebook the other day that said something along the lines of "those things you think take a lot of courage? really just  take a lot of money." Standing on principle is wonderful if you can afford it. How many OBGYNs in the United States want to go to prison/be sued for providing what, until last month, was routine medical care? It's easy to survey the situation and say they should fight. Doctors have families, too, and they want to keep them safe. It's all too easy for me to imagine houses burnt down and people shot. Still eager to perform that abortion?

India is buying all the gas it can get from Russia. African countries could give a gnat's arse for Ukraine: they've got much bigger issues closer to home, most notably food and where to get it. If you're an African leader, you do what you must to stave off starvation for your populace, and you do it without blinking. The Presidents of Ecuador and Sri Lanka have already discovered for themselves the Old Truth: You can only deprive people of so much before they come for you. You'll see a lot more of that in coming months and years. Eventually it'll be here in Canada. I truly hope I'm dead by then, because if I'm not I'll be killed in short order.

Raise prices high enough and nobody will be able to afford a class war.

What I'm saying is that the issues the world is facing -- the climate change, capitalism out of control, the shift to autocracy and fascism and the removal of rights -- all these things are not only connected, they spawn moral dilemmas. The definition of a dilemma is a problem with no clear solutio ns. Nation-states are faced with more and more of these -- it's all part and parcel of the collapse cascade. 

Perfect example: this inflation. 

We've been told inflation is a product of supply chain constraints brought about by covid and the war, coupled with increased demand from people flush with pandemic cash. High demand, low supply...prices go up, it's pretty simple. This is all true, but it sidesteps the reason people were flush with pandemic cash: enhanced benefits like the CERB, paid for with money printed out of thin air. More and more money chasing less and less wealth: the value of money goes down. It's pretty simple.  This crisis is government-created at every step.

But once the pandemic hit, what other course of action could they have taken? The CERB kept thousands of people from being homeless, and the pandemic measures that necessitated the CERB SAVED LIVES. Quite a large number of them. Canada lost 919 people per million, second lowest to Japan; America murdered  2730 people for every million citizens, and yes I know that's inflammatory but it's hard not to view it any other way from up here. Especially since they got the inflation, too, even with their massive death toll. 

Take your pick: much more death and misery from disease (not to mention a health care system that surely would have collapsed -- it came close as it was) ...  or crippling inflation/crippling rate hikes to control inflation. 

(Of course, we can quibble that rates should never have been allowed to go so low in the first place -- I'm not quibbling, I'm SHOUTING...excuse me, shouting...that they shouldn't have ever gone below 5%. People got addicted to free money and the party's over. That cold truth isn't any consolation for the millions of Canadians who never saw a single benefit of those low rates -- hell, millions of Canadians never saw a penny in pandemic benefits either, and we're all stuck here...)

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I have two articles here I'd like you to please read, or at least skim. They concern two very different issues, but I'm going to tease out a similarity. 

First: an interview with a Russian official concerning Russia's casus belli, or justification for war, with Ukraine. Reading it, I ask you to note the obvious inversions: Ukraine wasn't "pointed like a spear" at the heart of Russia but the reverse; NATO was never going to grant admission to Ukraine, but Russia's invasion prompted Sweden and Finland to join; note especially the Russian view of the West as morally corrupt because it's "lacking in Christian values". 

Which is the segue into this article. I must warn you: if you have any humanity in you at all, you will be outraged by just how much Republicans loathe women. Especially the bunch on the Supreme Court, three of whom have rape allegations in their pasts, let's not forget.

Note here how easily and breezily these men  -- all of them men, of course -- dismiss any possible suffering. About two percent of American pregnancies are ectopic, meaning the fetus implants outside the uterus. The treatment for this is immediate abortion: without that treatment, the mother sickens and quite likely dies. And Republicans don't give a SHIT about this. Either they say "well, that's not a real abortion (the famous  Shirley Exception ("surely the leopards won't eat MY face", says the man who has voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party every election) -- or they just flatly don't care. 

In case you're one of the people who believes the U.S. Supreme Court is just leaving a contentious issue for legislative bodies to rule on -- well, it's sickening enough that you think women's ability to control their lives, or even live at all, should be up to the whims of men. But every state that has criminalized abortion is trying to find every way it can to prevent women from travelling OUT of state for an abortion. 

Even if they miscarry. Even if the pregnancy is ectopic. Even when the woman dies. Even if she WANTED the baby.

These are self-proclaimed Christians, the lot of them. And, I mean, how could they not be? All you have to do is read your Word and you'll find out practically in the prologue that women are responsible for all the evil in the world, and that they are "cursed" to bear children. Jesus viewed women as equals, but all trace of Jesus has been removed from American Christianity. The men who run Church and State (but that's redundant) believe that a woman's place is in the home, subservient to her husband, pumping out good Christian kids. 

I believe the U.S. is too capitalist to go back to 1973 and revoke every credit card held by a woman -- but I fully expect some Republican to float that balloon in the next decade. Float it right out of the sewer. As it stands, you'll see pregnant women fitted with tracking devices. You can't enforce the travel bans (already taking shape) without them, after all. 

As awful as all this is, the playing with language is central to both stories, because language shapes thought.  You may recall a number of Republican men who have stated things like "a woman can't get pregnant from rape". This "not an abortion" talk is very similar. It's done to signal unfelt compassion. 

Black is white, up is down, if she's ten years old it can't be rape OR abortion, and NATO is the aggressor in the war with Russia. Does all of this sound familiar? The "Freedom" Convoy was "peaceful" (it had nothing to do with freedom and it sure as hell wasn't peaceful.) Trudeau is a weak soyboy communist fascist dictator, and if you can assemble anything coherent out of those adjectives, I quite frankly don't want to hear it. The Democrats stole 2020 (when in reality, the Republicans tried their damnedest to). DO YOU NOTICE A PATTERN.

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So this is where I'm struggling now. I've got my news content roughly in check -- enough news to check my mental boxes of things pro/regressing, not enough to drive me to suicide -- but where I'm having trouble is remembering everything I just wrote.

Nations are under a great deal of stress worldwide, and (sigh), yes, that's going to get a ton worse before it gets better. They're faced with a situation none of them have ever seen in anyone's living memory, and even as it happens the instinct is to deny it: surely our destiny is in the stars, or we'll blow ourselves to smithereens. No, the most likely course of action is the course we're actually on: catabolic collapse. It happens to everyone sooner or latter, and peak prosperity usually averages out to between 200-250 years. 

So we're facing catabolic collapse, all of us -- and that's bad enough. The ecological overshoot is going to speed things up,  condensing centuries of slow measured staircase into something a lot more like a ladder. And the forces of evil at work throughout the West are pouring gasoline on the fire. How to deal with the evil?

I use that word deliberately. Evil is the backwards of live, the Republicans and their Russian bot friends are a death cult, and everything is sdrawkcab-ssa in the world today, 

I see many people saying we mustn't dehumanize the people who long ago dehumanized us. I sincerely struggle with this. As much as I know the  only way to fight a belief is to empower its opposite, it is so so hard not to lash out at constant lies and ridiculous slurs. Jesus turned the other cheek. They killed him anyway. 

People and countries do awful things when they think the only alternatives are much worse. They do even more awful things when they convince themselves of righteous piety. There is a great deal of evil at loose in the world today, and I feel like there's not a damned thing I can do to even mitigate the tiniest particle of it. I want to just write all these people off...and if I do that too thoroughly, they'll come for me one day while my back is turned.

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I need a vacation. Luckily, in two shifts I shall have one.